In the summer of 1986, a remarkable Dutch man would mysteriously turn up murdered in his own apartment, in a crime that has sadly been all but forgotten.
Willem “Wim” Klein was born in Amsterdam in 1912, and his physician father initially attempted to push him into the same line of work. Willem did obtain a bachelor’s degree in medicine and took the first part of his doctoral exams, but eventually abandoned that career path in order to pursue his true calling: mathematics.
Willem Klein was, in fact, known as a human calculator; in other words, an individual who could do unbelievable mathematical computations in his head within seconds. This talent, incidentally, was shared by his older brother Leo, who died in a Nazi concentration camp in around 1942, after which Willem was forced to go into hiding to escape the same fate.
Willem lived a rather itinerant life after the war ended, performing for circuses around Europe under the stage name Pascal, but in 1952, he was recruited by the Mathematical Center in Amsterdam. Computers were still in their infancy at the time, and often, their powers of calculation were no match for people like Willem Klein, whose amazing feats would later be immortalized in The Guinness Book of World Records.
Willem would eventually go on to work at the world-famous CERN, assisting the physicists there with his lightning-fast mathematical processing, but as computers became better and faster, he found himself relegated more to entertainer status, performing for visitors that came through the facility. It should be noted, however, that CERN does recognize Willem Klein as their first “computer.”
Dispirited, Willem retired from CERN in 1976 and went back to doing his calculations on the circus stage, this time under the pseudonym Willy Wortel. He drew massive crowds in Europe, Japan, and the United States throughout the 1970s, and despite his alcoholism, kept up a rather rigorous schedule and never seemed to have problems with his mental mathematics at all.
But then, on August 1st, 1986, Willem’s housekeeper entered his home on the Brouwersgracht in Amsterdam, and found the seventy-three-year-old genius dead. He had been stabbed multiple times, and it appeared as though his residence had been ransacked, suggesting that the crime had perhaps been a robbery gone wrong.
Though a young man of Willem’s acquaintance was arrested for the murder shortly afterward, no evidence could be found linking the suspect to the homicide, and he was summarily released. The brutal death of CERN’s first human computer has since faded into relative obscurity, and it appears that no progress whatsoever has been made on the case for more than three decades.
Crime Immemorial 